Reel Power, Real Stakes

Vijay’s swansong film has become a proxy war in Tamil Nadu’s fiercely-contested election.

Tamil Nadu

With barley four months before Tamil Nadu goes to the polls, a film has managed to unsettle both the state’s entrenched rulers and the central government in Delhi. Jana Nayagan (“People’s Hero”), the final outing of the superstar-turned-politician Vijay, was meant to be a curtain call to a 30-year film career. It has instead turned into a full-blown constitutional melodrama, replete with a High Court stay, a censor-board rebellion and an extraordinary political pile-on.

The Madras High Court has blocked the film’s release until at least January 21, citing objections from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) that certain scenes could threaten “national security.” For a production that reportedly cost Rs. 500 crore, with theatres booked and Rs. 50 crore in advance collections, the delay is financially ruinous. But the bigger casualty is political. Vijay, who has launched the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) and declared his intention to become Chief Minister, had planned Jana Nayagan as a cinematic springboard into electoral politics.

In Tamil Nadu, cinema is the most potent political technology ever invented. The Dravidian movement mastered it in the 1950s and 1960s, turning films into ideological pamphlets and movie stars into mass leaders. M.G. Ramachandran and later Jayalalithaa rode celluloid stardom to the chief minister’s chair. Vijay’s gamble is that he can do the same in the age of social media and fragmented loyalties.

Jana Nayagan is explicitly designed for that purpose. The trailer presents Vijay as a crusader for fishermen, women and the poor, railing against corrupt institutions and entrenched elites. One line - “I have no intention of turning back. I am coming” - might as well be a campaign slogan. Songs and dialogues portray him less as a fictional hero than as a leader-in-waiting, a Tamil Nadu version of the anti-corruption crusaders who once electrified north India.

That is precisely why the film has become so sensitive. Its scheduled release clashed with Parasakthi, a film steeped in the iconography of the anti-Hindi agitations of the 1960s, the emotional bedrock of the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). In that ideological turf, the DMK brooks no rivals. Matters were inflamed further by reports that Vijay had bypassed Red Giant Movies, the DMK-linked distribution powerhouse run by the party’s first family, to release Jana Nayagan independently. In Tamil cinema, this is tantamount to a declaration of political war.

After a single judge cleared the film, the CBFC appealed, citing unremoved scenes that allegedly imperil national security. A division bench stayed the release. The optics were combustible. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin accused the BJP-led Union government of turning the censor board into yet another instrument of political intimidation, alongside the CBI and Enforcement Directorate. For once, the DMK found itself defending a rival if only to keep the Centre at bay.

The BJP, for its part, has been scrupulously silent, letting the CBFC do the talking. Congress leaders jumped in to back Vijay, triggering an awkward spat within the INDIA alliance. Some DMK figures accused Delhi of trying to nudge Vijay into the BJP’s National Democratic Alliance. Others saw the Centre using regulatory levers to unsettle regional power bases.

Tamil Nadu is a geopolitical outlier within India. It has resisted Hindi imposition, kept the BJP at bay and cultivated a distinct Dravidian identity. Delhi’s attempts to expand its footprint through culture, cinema or celebrity politicians have largely failed. Vijay’s rise threatens to scramble that equation. Unlike earlier film stars, he is positioning himself not as a DMK offshoot but as an anti-establishment insurgent, attacking both the ruling party in Chennai and the BJP in Delhi.

That makes him uniquely dangerous. For the DMK, he risks peeling away young and first-time voters disillusioned with incumbency. For the BJP, he offers a charismatic alternative to a party that has never cracked Tamil Nadu’s emotional code. For Delhi’s mandarins, a Vijay-led government would be another assertive regional actor complicating Centre–state relations.